Three Epochs in the Religious Education of Man

A Lecture given
by Rudolf Steiner
Ilkley, England
August 12th, 1923
GA 307

It is the 11th of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Ilkley,
England in August of 1923. The series of lectures is entitled:
The New Art of Education.
They were published in German as:
Gegenwaertiges Geistesleben und Erziehung.

This lecture was translated from a shorthand report, unrevised by
the lecturer, by an unknown translator.
It is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf
Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
From GA# 307.

Donated by an anonymous donor, this lecture has been made available to everyone.

Three
Epochs in the Religious
Education of Man

By RUDOLF STEINER

A lecture delivered during the Course on Education,
given at Ilkley, Yorkshire, on Sunday, August 12th, 1923. The
fourteen lectures on Education will shortly be published in book form
by the Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London.

IF we survey history as
one great whole, we see it — in spite of the many valleys and
lowlands breaking the heights of the ascending development of man
— as a continuous education of the human race, as a process
whereby a religious, a divine consciousness penetrates ever and again
into mankind.

In every epoch of human
evolution there has existed some kind of Initiation Science, analogous,
in its own way, to the Initiation Science outlined in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.
What I have there described is the Initiation Science of the present
age, and it leads us from a mere knowledge of Nature to a knowledge of
Spirit.

To this Initiation Science
the course of human evolution is revealed in a threefold light. We
can look back to a very ancient epoch which came to a close about the
year 800 B.C. Then we see an epoch radiant in
the light of the Mystery of Golgotha, when through Christ Jesus an
everlasting impulse entered into human evolution; and so too, there
can arise in our vision a third epoch, an epoch in which we stand
to-day and which, by a new Initiation Science, we have to bring to a
deeper reality.

Now over and above what is
imparted to man by his natural development, intelligence, reason,
will, feeling and by his earthly education, each of these three
epochs has striven for something else. In each of these epochs man
has sensed the existence of a mighty riddle, deeply interwoven with
his destiny. And always this riddle has assumed a different form
because the human race has passed through different conditions of
soul in the several epochs. It is only in the modern age of
abstractions, since the inception of the theory — invalid
though it be — that the soul of man has evolved from the animal
state, that the human soul could be thought of as having remained
unchanged through the ages.

Those whom a deeper science
has enabled to gaze with unbiased vision into the reality of life,
realise that the constitution of the human soul in the first epoch of
evolution was not by any means the same as in the epoch crowned by
the Mystery of Golgotha. Again there is a difference in our own
times, when we must learn to understand this Mystery of Golgotha if
it is not to be lost as a fact of knowledge.

In this sense, then, let us
consider the nature of the human soul in the ancient East, in an age
which produced the wisdom contained in the Vedas and the Vedanta
philosophy. Everywhere to-day men are turning back, and often with
great misunderstanding, to the Vedas and the Vedanta. If we look at
the souls of men in this ancient East, even at souls living in the
old Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian civilisation and on into the
earliest Greek period, we find that they were of quite a different
nature from the souls of men living to-day. The souls of men in those
ancient times passed through a much more dreamlike, spiritual
existence than the souls of modern men, who in their waking life are
wholly given up to sense impressions, to all that the intellect can
derive from these sense impressions and the substance flowing into
the human memory from them. What really constitutes the substance of
the soul of man to-day, did not bear the same form in the souls of
the ancients. These men possessed a much more instinctive wisdom of
the inner life of soul and Spirit. What we to-day would speak of as
the faculty of clear and conscious discernment, did not as yet exist.
Man experienced a weaving, moving inner life, the shadowy echoes of
which remain in our present dream-life. It was an inner life,
in which man not only knew with certainty that a soul was weaving and
moving through his body, forming part of his true manhood, but in
which he also knew: A soul, born from a divine-spiritual existence
before a body clothed me in my earthly existence, is living within
me.

In those ancient times man
experienced his own being in a kind of waking dream. He knew himself
as soul and in this inner, living experience felt the body as
a kind of sheath, merely an instrument for the purposes of earthly
existence. Even in his waking hours man lived in this consciousness
of soul — dreamlike though it was. And he knew with clear
conviction that before a physical body clothed him on Earth, he had
lived as soul in a divine-spiritual world. Direct inner
perception revealed to him this life of soul and Spirit, and, as a
consequence, his consciousness of death was quite different from that
of modern man. To-day man feels that he is deeply linked with his
body. His inner consciousness of soul is not detached from his
bodily life as was the case in earlier times. He looks upon birth as
a beginning, death as an end.

So living and intimate was
the experience of the permanent, eternal nature of the soul in the
ancients, that they felt themselves raised above birth and death in
their contemplation of this life of soul. Birth and death were states
of growth, metamorphoses of life. They knew the reality of a
pre-earthly existence and hence with equal certainty that they would
live on beyond the gate of death. Birth and death were transitory
occurrences in an unceasing life.

It has, however, always
been necessary for man's immediate experience to be widened and
deepened by knowledge that penetrates to the spiritual world, by an
Initiation Science that tells him more than can arise within his
inner being or is imparted to him in ordinary life by earthly
education. It fell to the old Initiates, the teachers of that ancient
humanity, to give the answer to a definite riddle that arose in the
souls of men. As I have said, these men knew of the soul' and Spirit
in immediate experience. But there was a great riddle and it arose in
the soul in this form: Through conception and birth I pass into
physical life and move upon Earth; I am clothed in my physical body
and this body contains the very same substances as those of dead,
outer Nature. I am clothed in something that is foreign to my being.
Between birth and death I live in a body — a body of Nature. I
am born in a physical sense but this physical birth is foreign to my
inner sense of being.

The mighty riddle before
the man of very ancient times, as he gazed into his innermost being,
was not a riddle connected with the soul or Spirit, but with
Nature. And it arose before him as he sensed the full inner
reality of soul and Spirit and then felt the need to understand why
he was clothed in a physical body so foreign to his real being. It
was the task of Initiation Science to teach man how he could direct
the same forces which enabled him to gaze into the life of soul and
Spirit, to outer Nature as well — to Nature whose
manifestations are otherwise dumb and inarticulate. And if after
adequate training — so it was taught by that ancient Initiation
Science — man directs to stone, plant, animal, to clouds,
stars, to the courses of Sun and Moon, the forces which otherwise
lead only to inner knowledge, he can know and understand outer Nature
as well. Then he beholds the Spiritual not only in his inner being
but also in bubbling spring, flowing river and mountain, in the
gathering clouds, in lightning, thunder, in stone, plant and
animal.

Thus did an ancient
Initiation Science speak to man: “Gazing into thine own being,
thou hast living experience of soul and Spirit, thou hast found the
Divine within thee. But Initiation Science trains the power which
otherwise beholds the Divine in man alone, also to behold the Divine
in the whole life of Nature. Thou art clothed in an outer physical
body. Know that this body too is from God. Physical birth hath
brought thee into an earthly existence which is itself of a Divine
origin.”

And so the task of ancient
Initiation Science was to give man this sublime teaching: “Know
that thou art born of God not only when thine eyes gaze inwards. In
the body that comes into the world through physical birth —
there also thou art born of God.” And all that the old Father
Initiation placed before the soul of man was expressed, in after
times, in three penetrating words:

Ex Deo Nascimur.

This was the first way in
which Initiation Wisdom worked upon man and awakened a religious
consciousness within him.

The old heathen cults
assumed the form of Nature-religions because man felt the need for a
justification of his physical birth in Nature. The riddle of Nature
— this was what confronted his soul; and in this Ex Deo
Nascimur the riddle of Nature was solved and he could feel
his earthly existence hallowed, although in his waking life he still
felt himself a being of Spirit and soul, transcending the
Physical.

* * *

As the course of evolution
continued, man's early, dreamlike experience of soul and Spirit
— which was indeed a kind of innate knowledge of his true inner
being — faded gradually into the background. He began more and
more to use the instruments afforded by his physical body. Let me
express it as follows: The dreams of a life of soul and Spirit that
characterised a primal instinct in the human race, faded away into
darkness, and for the first time indeed in the last few thousands of
years before the Mystery of Golgotha, men learnt to make use of their
outer senses and of the intellect bound up with these outer senses.
What we to-day call “Nature” appeared before men as an
actual experience. It was the task of the old wise Initiates to
unfold the spirituality of Nature to the human soul. The purely
physical quality of outer Nature was now there as a question before
the soul. To the old riddle of man's earthly existence there was
added the second great riddle in the history of evolution —
that of man's earthly death.

It was only in the last few
thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha that man really
came to feel death in earthly existence with any intensity. Whereas
in earlier times he had little sense of his body and a strong sense
of soul and Spirit, he now felt and experienced his being in the
physical body. And death, the enigmatic event that is bound up
with the physical body, was experienced by him as the greatest riddle
of existence in this second epoch. This riddle of death emerges with
great intensity among the ancient Egyptians, for instance. They
embalmed their corpses because they; experienced the terror of death,
because they were aware of the kinship of the physical body (in which
they sensed their own existence) with death. “How do I live in
my earthly body?” This had been the first riddle. “How do
I pass through earthly death?” — this was the second.

In the days when man had
gazed upwards to the soul and Spirit, when the soul and Spirit were
immediate experience to his instinctive clairvoyance, he knew: When
the chains that bind me to this earthly existence fall away, I shall
belong to the Earth no more. My earthly being will be changed and lo!
I shall once again live in the super-earthly kingdom, I shall be
united with the stars. — For the soul knew the stars
spiritually in the living, instinctive existence of days of
yore. Man read his destiny in the stars. He felt himself united with
Sun and Moon; he knew the stars. “From the Spirit in the stars,
from a pre-earthly existence I have come forth. To the stars to the
Spirit in the stars — I shall return, when I pass through the
gate of death.”

But now all this became a
riddle. Man confronted death, beholding in death the body's end. He
felt his soul inwardly bound to the body and with a deep awareness of
this riddle he asked himself: “What becomes of me after death?
How do I pass through the portal of death?” And to begin with,
there was nothing on the Earth which could help him to solve this
riddle.

The old Initiates knew how
to explain to man the riddle of Nature. Ex Deo Nascimur —
this was how they answered, if we translate their words into a
later tongue. But now, all consciousness of the pre-earthly existence
whither man would return after he had passed the gate of death, all
that was so clearly revealed to the ancients, was obliterated from
the human soul. The instinctive knowledge, arising in man as his life
of soul and Spirit flowed upwards to the stars, was no longer there.
And then a mighty event occurred. — The Spirit of the world of
stars — He Whom a later age called “Christ” and an
earlier Greek age, the “Logos” — descended upon
Earth, descended in His Substance as a Spiritual Being and took flesh
upon Himself in the human body of Jesus of Nazareth. It was given to
mankind to experience the greatest event of earthly existence. He
Whose life had been divined by the ancients as they gazed upwards to
the stars, the Godhead of Whom the Divine-Earthly is also part,
passed through earthly life and through death. For the death and
resurrection of Christ were, in the first place, the most essential
features for those who truly understood Christianity.

And so, this passing of the
God Who in earlier times only revealed Himself from the stars —
this passing of the Godhead through a human body — contained
the solution of the second riddle of existence, the riddle of death,
inasmuch as the mystery was revealed in the so-called Gnosis by the
Initiates of the age of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates could
now teach men: The Being Who erstwhile dwelt in Eternity, in the
stars, has descended into a human body and has vanquished death in a
human body. The Christ has now become an “extract” of the
Spirit, of the Logos, of the Universe. The old Initiates had pointed
to Nature, saying: “Out of God is this Nature born.” Now
the Initiates could teach man how he can be united with the Divine
Being Who descended into Jesus of Nazareth, Who in the man Jesus of
Nazareth passed, as all men pass, through the gate of death, but Who
had conquered death. And once again it was possible for man to solve
this second riddle of death, even as he had formerly solved the
riddle of Nature.

In Buddhism we are told
that the Buddha found the four great Truths, one of which awoke
within him at the sight of a corpse, when he was seized by the
despair of the human body in death. About six hundred years
before the Mystery of Golgotha, as a last remnant of ancient
thought, the Buddha had the vision of death. Six hundred years
after the Mystery of Golgotha, men began to gaze at the dead
human form on the Cross. And just as Buddha believed that in the
corpse he had discovered the truth of suffering as a last
fragment of ancient thought, so now a humanity permeated with the
Christ impulse gazed at the dead figure on the Cross, at the
crucifix, and felt in this figure the heavenly guarantee of a life
beyond death — for death had been conquered by Christ in the
body of Jesus.

Because of their fear of
death, the Egyptians embalmed their corpses, to preserve, as it were,
the Nature-forces in man from death. This was in the age of Ex Deo
Nascimur. The early Christians, in whom the impulse of esoteric
Christianity was still living, buried their dead but held divine
service over the grave in the sure conviction that death is conquered
by the soul that is united with Christ; the tomb became an altar.
From the Mystery of Golgotha flowed the certainty that if man is
united with Christ, Who as the spiritual essence of the stars
descended upon Earth and passed through life, death and resurrection
in a human form, he himself as man, will conquer death.

Thus God the Father
was the answer to the riddle of Nature. Christ was the answer
to the riddle of death. Death had lost its sting. Henceforth death
became a powerful argument (which formerly had not been
necessary) for the metamorphosis of life.

The Gnosis — which
was later exterminated, and of which fragments only have been
preserved — proves that as the Christian Initiates contemplated
the Mystery of Golgotha, in the certainty that Christ had descended
to Earth and had awakened to new life the death-bringing forces in
the Earth, they were able to instil into humanity the truth of the
union of mortal man on Earth with Christ. Through Christ, man redeems
the forces of death within him and awakens them to life. And
so the Initiates were now able to impart a new consciousness of
immortality to men, saying: “Your souls can be united with Him
Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha; you can live in the life,
death and resurrection of Christ. If your earthly life is more than a
mere natural existence, if it is such that. Christ's Kingdom is
awakened in your dealings with all your fellow-men, you live in
communion with Christ Himself. Christ, the Divine Being, becomes your
brother; in death and in life you die in Christ.” The truth of
life in God the Son, in Christ, could now be added to the primeval
truth of birth from God the Father, and to Ex Deo Nascimur was
added:

In Christo Morimur.

“In Christ we
die” — that is to say — “As soul, we
live!”

Such was the wisdom of man
in the epoch that began about a thousand years before the Mystery of
Golgotha and came to its close in the fifteenth century A.D. We are now living in a third epoch which we must
learn to understand aright. So in the education of the human race
directed by the great Divine Teachers of the world, there was added
to the truth “Out of God the Father we are born” —
this truth — “In Christ the Son we die, in order that we
may live.”

* * *

The great riddles of the
first and second epochs stand clearly before us when we look back
over history. The riddle of the third epoch in which we have been
living for some centuries is as yet little known or felt, albeit it
exists subconsciously in the feeling life of man and he yearns for
its solution as deeply as he once yearned for the solution of the
riddle of his earthly nature and then of his earthly death.

Since the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries man has acquired a knowledge that penetrates
deeply into Nature. Think only of the starry heavens which were once
revealed to the dream-consciousness of the ancients and from which
they read their destiny. External calculations, geometry and
mechanics have taught man more and more about the stars since the
approach of our present age. The science of the stars, of animals and
plants has spread abroad in the form of a pure science of Nature. It
was very different in the first epoch of human evolution and
different again in the second, when in the depths of their souls men
knew the truth of that which the old clairvoyant powers of the soul
read in the stars, and which had descended in Christ into the body of
Jesus of Nazareth. Thus Christ lived among men, and men of the second
epoch looked to the Christ, felt Him in their hearts and in this deep
communion with Him they experienced what the Spirit of the Cosmos had
once revealed to an old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness as the
justification of earthly existence. In the second epoch, man lived in
cosmic spheres, as it were, inasmuch as he lived in communion with
the Christ Who had descended from these cosmic spheres to Earth.

Then came the third epoch,
when the world of stars was understood merely through calculation,
when men looked through the telescope and spectroscope and discovered
in the stars the same dead elements and substances as exist on
the Earth. In this epoch men can no longer see Christ as the Being
Who descended from the stars, because they do not know that the stars
are the expression of the Spiritual Essence weaving through the
Cosmos. And so the Cosmos is void of God, bereft of Christ, for
mankind to-day.

Therefore it is that the
inner consciousness of man is now menaced by the danger of losing
Christ. The first signs are already visible. The ideas of Divine
Wisdom, of Theology, which for centuries contained full knowledge of
the Christ revelation, are now in many respects powerless to find the
Christ, the God in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Many who contemplate
the age of the Mystery of Golgotha no longer find Christ as a Cosmic
Being, they find only the man — Jesus of Nazareth. The starry
heavens are bereft of God, they are a part of Nature and men can no
longer recognise in Him Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha,
the Being Whose “physical kingdom” is the whole cosmos,
but Who dwelt in, the man Jesus of Nazareth in the age of the
Mystery of Golgotha.

Inasmuch as these things
can be deeply experienced in the inner being, there is a difference
between one who treads the path of Initiation Wisdom and one who
merely stands within external Natural Science. This Natural Science
has lost the Spirit of the Cosmos and the danger approaches that
humanity will also lose sight of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

Therefore it is that those
who in our age penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of Nature
that has blossomed forth in the third period of evolution since the
fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, feel the third great riddle of
man's earthly development. They look back in history to the first
great riddle — that of man's earthly nature; to the second
riddle of his earthly death. And the third riddle arises within them,
whispering something that as yet they do not like to face, although
they feel it subconsciously and with a certain emphasis in their
hearts. The Initiates of our age say to themselves: “We are
living in the world which once spoke to man from out of the cosmos
— spoke as the Spirit. In days of yore man lived a life
of full wakefulness in the cosmos. Gradually this waking life in the
cosmos, this feeling of oneness with the Christ Who descended to
Earth as the Being Who preserves this awareness of the spiritual
cosmos in man, faded away, and we are now living in a cosmos that is
revealed to us merely in its outer aspect. Cosmic ideas are
experienced by us only in dreams. The cosmos is weighed in the scales
of a balance, observed by the telescope. Such is our dream! And
instead of uniting us with the Spirit of the cosmos, this dream
separates us from Him.”

And so the third great
riddle of the sleep of knowledge, the sleep into which
mankind has fallen, stands before those who live in the third epoch
of evolution, the third epoch, not only of “uninitiated”
but of Initiation Science.

Deeper spirits of the human
race have felt this. Descartes felt it, for he finally began to doubt
the validity of all knowledge yielded by outer Nature. But, to begin
with, it was felt only dimly. More and more deeply there must enter
into men the consciousness that the whole domain of knowledge of
which they have been so proud for some five centuries, represents a
sleep of existence. This third great riddle must stand more and more
clearly before them. Why do we dwell in an earthly, physical body?
Why do we pass through earthly death? And in the third epoch this
question arises in the hearts of men: Why this sleep of a
knowledge directed merely to outer Nature? How can we awaken from the
dream that this “calculated” universe represents, how can
we pass from this cosmos whose external aspect is revealed through
Astro-Physics and Astro-Chemistry, and stand face to face with the
cosmos that in the depths of our innermost being unites us once again
with its deepest Essence? How can we wake from the dream into which
knowledge has fallen in recent times?

Ex Deo Nascimur —
this was the answer given by the Initiates in the earliest times
to man's question, “Why do I live in an earthly body?” In
the age of the Mystery of Golgotha the Initiates sought to solve the
riddle of death by linking man with Christ Jesus Who had passed
through the Mystery of Golgotha, answering in the words of a later
tongue, In Christo Morimur. And it is the task of modern
Initiation Science in this our age and in the following centuries,
gradually to lead mankind to a divine consciousness, to a religious
life, and make it possible for him to awaken in his innermost being a
spiritual knowledge of the cosmos. The Initiation Science that must
arise through Anthroposophy does not wish merely to be an extension
of our present sleeping knowledge — although men are
proud of this knowledge and its outer successes have been so
splendid. Anthroposophical Initiation Science would awaken this
sleeping knowledge, would awaken man, who is fettered in the
“dreams” of reason and intellectuality.

Hence, the Initiation
Science that would be borne by Anthroposophy is not a mere extension
of facts and discoveries of knowledge, but an impulse to an
awakening, an attempt to answer the question: How can we wake
from the sleep of life? And so, just as the earliest Initiates had
explained Ex Deo Nascimur, and those who came later In
Christo Morimur — the Initiation Wisdom which bears within
itself a future life of conscious spiritual knowledge, a life leading
to a deepening of religious feeling, a divine consciousness —
this Initiation Wisdom would fain lead man once again to know that
the Christ Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha is the Logos,
weaving and working through the cosmos. And inasmuch as man will
gradually grow to be conscious of his cosmic existence, the
Initiation Science that is intended to inaugurate a spiritual
Christology in the truest sense (as well as an Art of Education, for
instance, in a narrower sphere), will strive to bring a religious
mood into the practical life it ever seeks to serve. —
“Out of God we are born as physical human beings” —
“In Christ we die” — that is to say, “As
soul, we live.” To these truths Initiation Science will ever
strive to add the third: “When we press forward
through the new Initiation to the Spirit, then even in this earthly
existence we live in the Spirit.” We experience an
awakening of knowledge whereby all our life is bathed in the light of
true religion, in the light of a moral goodness proceeding from
inward piety. In short, this new Initiation Science endeavours to
supplement the answers to the first and second riddles of Initiation
as expressed in Ex Deo Nascimur and in, In Christo Morimur
— although at the same time it solves them anew and
restores them to the soul of man. It endeavours to bring afresh and
in full clarity to the human heart, this other truth — a truth
that will awaken the Spirit in heart and soul: In the understanding
of the living Spirit, we ourselves, in body, soul and Spirit, shall
be re-awakened —